A Poetics of Resistance: the Postmodern Ginsberg

A Poetics of Resistance: The Postmodern Ginsberg Songok H. Thornton & William H. Thornton <Department of English, Providence University) The term postmodernism traces back to Irving Howe in the late 1950s, and gained currency with Leslie Fiedler and Ihab Hassan in the 1960s (Huyssen 256). Since that time the term has lost much of its radical bite, and is often (as with Habermas) viewed as a conservative sheep in wolf's clothes. Huyssen contends that "the adversary and critical element in the notion of postmodernism can only be fully grasped if one takes the late 19508 as the starting point of a mapping of the postmodern" (267). The early career of Ginsberg bears this out. Ginsberg's personal transition from Beat withdrawal into the involved, critical climate of the 1960' s counter-culture coincided with his return from the Orient to a very different America. As Bruce Cook describes it, no one "talked much about the Beat Generation anymore, but that didn't mean that he and Kerouac and Corso and all the rest had gone unheeded. The Hippies and Yippies of the 1960s appropriated the Beat message and agenda and made them their own. They welcomed Allen Ginsberg as a guru ... " (Cook 195). Thus Ginsberg's biographical transition was to be a milestone not only in the formation of postmodern poetics, but also in the development of what Huyssen calls a postmodernism of "resistance" (292). Bridging Beat Generation alienation and the radical mood of the 1960s, Ginsberg forged a poetic style featuring natural pictures of common life, yet directly expressing his political and social concerns. Avoiding the modernist cult of multiple personalities and impersonal objectivity, he attempts to merge art and life within his hallucinatory imagery, frankly sharing his intimate experience of drugs and homosexuality. He has no use for the concept of the lordly author or poet. Rather, he presents himself on the plane of the ordinnry--though his life and poetry are hardly ordinary in their quality and commitment. They are in open revolt against all kinds of totality: cultural, political, environmental, and aesthetic. To understand Ginsberg's revolt against modernist aesthetics, it is helpful to recall Kermode's distinction ,between an early, 'paleo-modernism' and 'neo-modernism.' The latter was a form of avant-garde anti-art which entirely broke with tradition. According to Wortman, avant-garde modernism (which we may equate with Kermode's neo-modernism) was fundamentally based on "a stable middle class of positivistic philistines" (Wortman 175). This interpretation shows the influence of Trilling and Daniel Bell, who consider modernism to have been absorbed into mainstream culture. Even Time magazine once proclaimed that modernism had become the culture of our era (I 75). Wortman, accordingly, holds that "those who still believe they are attacking the capitalist system by antagonizing its values have missed the point: the destruction of value is a most effective tool in the furtherance of its system" (175). As Daniel Bell put it, we are coming to a watershed in Western society: we are witnessing the end of the bourgeois idea-that view of human action and social relations, particularly of economic exchange-which has molded the modern era for the last 200 years. And I believe that we have reached the end of the creative impulse and ideological sway of modernism, which, as a cultural movement, has dominated all the arts, and shaped our symbolic expressions, for the past 125 years. (Bell 7) Given the absorption of avant-gardism into establishment values, any anti-establishment revolt would first have to deal with the old avant-garde. Ginsberg was a leading advocate of that postmodernism which "was groping to recapture the adversary ethos which had nourished modern art in its earlier stages ... " (Huyssen 265). His work anticipates Kermode's condemnation of modernist irresponsibility. Late modernism, in Kermode's view, produced more "muddle, certainly, and almost certainly more jokes, but no revolution, and much less talent" (Kermode 671). Kermode asserts that '''indifference' and the abrogation of 'responsibility' are the wilder cousins of the more literary 'impersonality' and 'objectivity'" (Kermode 664). Ginsberg, by contrast, blasts us with his personality throughout his poetry. Nothing could be farther from the modernist dictum, as expressed by Auden, that "Art is not Life and cannot bel A midwife to society" (qtd. in Kermode 662). The artistic pulse of Keruoac can still be felt in Ginsberg's counter-dictum that "art lies in the consciousness of doing the thing, in the attention to the happening, in the sacramentalization of everyday reality, the God-worship in the present conversation, no matter what" (Simpson 68). To accomplish this he had to "get out of fantasy ... " (68). Like Kerouac in On the Road, he strives to "get to reality" by putting down "every recurrent thought" (68-69). As impossible as it is to separate Ginsberg'S art from his life, his model of reality is never simply mimetic. His vision of alternate realism as a political instrumentali ty 97 corresponds to the transformation of the Left's comprehension of reality itself. While the Old Left held fast to naive realism, the New Left adopted the kind of reconstructive realism that was often expressed--to the chagrin of culturally conservative leftists such as Philip Rahv, who supported the New Left while attacking the counterculture (Podhoretz 866) more in alternative lifestyles than in alternative ideas. Ginsberg, however, was equally adept in both. Ginsberg's perennial objective has been to make a concrete difference, responding, for example, to nuclear reactors by screaming, "I dare your reality ... " (Plutonian Ode 36-37, in Ginsberg 703). Often he has sought alterity in the possible worlds of hallucinatory reality. His mode of realism bears some similarity with Thomas Pavel's postmodern realism, where an indeterminant reference exists between possible worlds (Merrell 9). For Ginsberg, though, the axis of all reference is his own, ever-intransigent self (Simpson 66). Through autobiography and spontaneity, Ginsberg is searching for a new sense of referentiality. As Tucker points out, it is impossible to separate Ginsberg's art from his life, because "that's what he does ... It is his great accomplishment, a rebellious act backed up by an observational precision and emotional generosity ... " (196). Ginsberg, that is, draws his private experience into his poetry to create a personal model of the real. His homosexuality, for example, becomes a building block of this referentiality, which stands as a challenge to given social and political institutions. As a rebel, like Whitman, he stands up against totality, materialism, industrial technocracy and the bureaucracies which serve all three. Unfortunately Ginsberg is popularly associated with a drug-induced retreat from such "real world" concerns. He tends to be remembered for his eccentricities, though his lasting importance owes more to his realism. We shall defend his place as a postmodern realist within five broad categories of postmodernism. The first of these categories is a revolt against totality and system, ranging from government bureaucracy to philistinism in daily life. Ginsberg, for example, equates the shallow conventionalism of a "fluffy female" at a cocktail party with System per se, This woman · .. glared at me and said immediately: "I don't like you," turned her head away, and refused to be introduced. I said, "What!" "Why you narcissistic bitch! How can you decide when you don't even know me ... ("In Society," 3) Often Ginsberg's anti-totality motif is applied to industrialism. Here he identifies indus trialism with a plane dropping in flames. In a spinning plane, A false machine, The pilot drops in flame From the unseen. ("Crash," 49) Ginsberg's antipathy toward mechanical civilization is closely allied to his anti-war sentiments. A notable example is "Howl," his scream of protest against "Moloch whose mind is pure machinery ... Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks ... " ("Howl," 131). Simpson notes that "Howl," like so many Ginsberg poems, takes the side of "the rejected, the deviant, the criminal, and the insane" (74). Moloch, as Whittemore observes, is but another name for the System (163). 2. Pop Culture and Hallucinatory Aesthetics Ginsberg's hallucinatory aesthetics become his media of convergence between life and art, as well as high and pop culture. In an updated sense, he is democratic like Whitman. Middlebrook, for example, links Ginsberg's "The Fall of America" to the angry Whitman of "Democratic Vistas" (200). Ginsberg himself seems at times to exchange persona with Whitman, imagining him (self) as a "childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys" ("A Supermarket in Galifornia," 136). Ginsberg, however, finds it necessary to use drugs to regenerate the primal, egalitarian aesthetics which came easier for Whitman. Drugs remove the boundary between real and unreal, affording direct perception, and blurring the boundary between fine and popular arts (Lyon 194). Following Whitman, Ginsberg ties both the fine and the popular to sensual experience, making no effort to hide his homosexuality. Be broadcasts his apocaiyptic vision with a street language that shocks us and adds immediacy to his poetry of liberation_ He offers himself as a symbol of liberty vis-a-vis a war economy and the all-but-irrelevant culture of High Modernism, which according

Load more